Rain journal entry 4

I had a lazy waking up. My eyes denied opening, and I had a back pain.

If I was a dumber person, I’d say that my capsule shrunk, but that wasn’t the case. For seventy years of travel, my body has grown as everything in space was prone to expand. I doubt my exoskeleton is going to fit, and our supplies of duck tape will have to make due and hold the limbs of a space suit together.

I touched the gaps in my capsule. It wasn’t leaking oxygen. So, why do I smell smoke? Odd.

Like in a nightmare, I wiped the screen and saw the opposite capsule. It was destroyed, burnt and hollow. Straps were charcoaled and hanging frozen. A big hole was near it. Something must have pierced the bowel and buzzed through our ship.

I turned on the emergency beacon. If there is somebody in the cockpit, they’ll see the blinker and come to my aid. If there is nobody awake, I might as well starve to death. I can’t go back to hibernation. My capsule timelock ticked it’s last.

A beam of light came, a drone picked up my capsule and took me in space. A purple nebula winked at me, and then a frozen corpse slid over the glass and went away. It was a rude awakening to reality.

The machine brought me to the shaft and the door closed. The whole thing passed the circle of hissing noise from the decontamination area before I was put in the hall with scantily dressed soldiers- already in their element.

“We got another one!” A soldier of slim figure yelled to the others and I could barely hear him.

He was covered in machine oil, his dark hair trimmed and a wide creepy smile on his face made him look like a tunnel rat. He took a special tool and started cutting wires. For a mechanic, he hasn’t adopted the training in his ‘dormant feed cycle’.

The door hissed and opened up to present me the stale air in the ship and heat coming from the sides.

I got up, stretched and looked at the soldier who smoked a cigarette and stared at my confused face. He lit up my eyes, checked my skin and tapped me in the back.

“A slight concussion and a few bruises. No sign of travel dysphoria. He’ll live.” He said walking away and playing with the tool in his hand, and I knew I had a completely disorganized unit on my hand.

Through the open door of the cockpit, I caught glimpses of people trying to keep the ship running and heard curses, laughter, chatter, and someone’s wailing. Like a zombie, I stumbled in and threw my hand up to shade myself from the strong light.

“Who the fuck is this?” A man behind the console asked.

“Lieutenant Rain, second pilot of the U.S.S. Saphire,” I said and he grunted.

“Welcome back.” He added and got back to what he was doing.

Someone could say I was lucky to be alive, but fuck this life if I have to spend it in hell. I came closer and swiped the room for staff count. Six of us were in here. All strangers.

“Where are we? What’s the year? What happened?” I gawked.

“Orion my friend. We made it. It’s like a trench warfare. Earth Core is trying to overwhelm their battle lines with soldiers and hope we breakthrough. We are just passing the first circle of destruction. I don’t know how to operate this damn thing. It’s like its written in gibberish.” He frowned and kept typing stuff. “Year is 3180. Almost a hundred years of travel. Our ship was hit by a passing bolide. It’s a clean cut, but a lot of damage. The lower compartments are cut off from the system, so we can freely guess all of them froze to death. Upper levels are running, but sometimes it makes a short circuit and ejects a capsule or two. We are running below half of our power. The stats are showing a spike in magnetic fields. Must’ve been that we entered a magnetic river and it pulled us away from the course.”

“Magnetic river?” I asked and made a face like I bit on a lemon.

“Yeah. When an object hits a stagnant matter in space, either it shards to pieces, or it moves. This one started swirling so rapidly, it’s magnetic fields came lashing in space and one of them whips clipped us good. Our engineer on a deck made a few adjustments to the engine, so the reactor is refracting the polarity and flipped it over so we are good for now.”

I crumbled down to the floor and gasped. That wailing guy wouldn’t shut up and nobody paid attention to him.

“What’s with the opera singer?” I asked the mechanic.

“Steve here couldn’t take the ‘feed’. It burned his brain. He is wicked smart, intelligent and ingenious with the weapon systems, but he is unable to eat or zip up his space suit.” The mechanic used the tool in hand to scratch his head.

“The word you are looking for is autism.” I frowned at the bastard and he issued me a sly grin.

“Yeah, hibernation can cause that. But this is a good kind. Fluffy kind. Fun kind.” He kept laughing, and me, I dragged my jaw against the floor in horror.

It seems I only have you to keep me in check. Read my entries as I go along with this mission. For now, I am trying to keep the horny guy away from me as I try to find a good place on the floor to sleep.

Maybe tomorrow will be better and I’ll finally wake up from this dream.

I used the reference where a pilot left stranded in Alaska had to use duck tape to rebuild the wings of his Cessna after a polar bear demolished it. It worked. 😀 Also, army guys use duck tape to fix pretty much anything. 😀

And yet where I live, gaffa tape is different again – it’s the one to use if you want to be able to take it cleanly off the receptacle, and electrical tape is a vinyl-based tape that stretches! Isn’t it funny how we have assumptions based on our use and acceptance of the ordinary things in our lives? There could be a story in this … or at the very least, a plot twist … hmmmmm

And where I live, we don’t have a classic looking duck tape. We’ve got a clear, transparent type of tape used for everything, paper-side tape for isolation, a rubber compound wire isolation tape, but not silver kind and your versions. 😀